The Ashes of the City: Architecture, Environment, and the Spatial Economy of Coal in Britain (1700–1849)

Abstract

This dissertation examines the architectural and infrastructural transformations that followed the rise of coal use in Britain, surveying a period in between coal’s initial adoption in the seventeenth century and the industrialization of the later nineteenth century. At the center of the study is the formation of the world’s first market for fossil fuel in Britain’s central metropolis, London. By examining the spaces of supply, transport, exchange, and consumption that were connected to this market, the dissertation reveals the material, cultural, and ideological consequences that emerged in the process of constructing a world with the surplus energy of coal.

The project proceeds through four chapters, each addressing a different scale of analysis: household, infrastructure, marketplace, and monument. This arc begins with a reexamination of the effects of coal on the design of the domestic fireplace, where the greatest part of London’s fossil fuel was first burned. Next, it considers the connections and dependencies that formed between mine and metropolis, from the construction of large-scale transportation networks that supplied the city with fuel, to the unexpected consequences of coal use on the early modern built environment—its role in propelling London’s unprecedented physical growth and the novel, corrosive pollution that resulted from its widespread consumption. The third chapter examines the development of an urban market for fossil fuel, leading up to a series of commercial and political debates that gathered around the first London Coal Exchange, a building constructed in 1769 to house the trade’s merchants and middlemen. The dissertation concludes with the opening of the second London Coal Exchange on October 30, 1849, following a period of intensive growth in coal-fired steam power and iron production. In this culminating structure, the social, cultural, and economic significance of fossil fuel was transfigured into monumental, architectural form.

In contrast to the sweeping views offered by many histories of energy, the designs discussed in this project turn towards the tangible and specific: a fireplace, a coal wagon, a trade card, or an exchange building. By placing these artifacts within their larger social and natural contexts, the dissertation reveals how the adoption of coal not only affected material conditions, but also began to shape fundamental concepts around household comfort, the growth of commerce, and the unstable boundary between human and natural history. During most of this transitional period, coal use was still understood as a regional peculiarity, rather than a model to be adopted by or imposed onto others. As London’s streets, waterfronts, and buildings became part of an unintentional experiment in creating an energy-intensive urban society, coal reshaped space at multiple scales, from the social construction of bodily expectations to the expansive potential of infrastructures and economies. Taken together, these episodes describe the emergence of a new kind of culture that was founded, in part, on the specious belief that fossil-fueled societies had begun permanently conquering the uncertainties of the natural world.